The call for tenders for the railway and technological equipment and maintenance of the international section of the new Lyon-Turin freight and passenger railway line was published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 26 June 2023.
The call for tenders has an estimated value of €2.930 billion and, in accordance with the French Public Procurement Code, is structured as a “global performance contract”, combining the maintenance phase with the design and construction phase in order to achieve quantified performance targets. These objectives are defined as measurable performance commitments.
Specifically, the contract requires not only the design and construction of the works and installations to equip and operate the new line, but also the provision of maintenance services for at least seven years after the line’s commissioning.The deadline for applications is 2 p.m. on 19 October 2023.
Equipping the line
In order to make the Mont Cenis base tunnel a fully interoperable railway, a series of installations and technological facilities are planned: 140 km of tracks and catenaries, two command and control centres at the ends of the infrastructure to manage the tunnel systems and the traffic, with 24/24 monitoring thanks to a system of more than 900 cameras and sensors installed along the entire route. Three independent electrical substations will power the traction and all the equipment on the line.
Five safety areas, three of which will be underground, will be equipped with emergency rooms with their own outside air exchange and will be able to accommodate up to 1,200 people each.
Ventilation in the tunnel will be provided by five central ventilation units using the four existing adits and the Avrieux dual-flow shafts which, in the event of a fire, will simultaneously extract smoke and supply clean air to the safety areas. In the event of an emergency, two evacuation and rescue trains and six bimodal (road-rail) vehicles are also planned. The underground areas will be equipped with water mist extinguishing systems (misting) connected by heat-sensitive fibre-optic cables, which will enable the exact location of an incident to be detected immediately and the information transmitted to the operator in the control room, who can then activate the misting to extinguish the fire on the spot.
To ensure safety along the tunnel, there are 180 bypasses planned between the two tubes (one every 333 m) and 360 evacuation gates, as well as eight fire stations with water tanks capable of operating autonomously for more than 10 hours.
TELT’s next missions
Other contracts may be awarded within the framework of the operational construction site 12, which will also be put out to tender in the near future: Technical assistance to the project owner, which will provide engineering support during the design and then the commissioning of the railway and technical installations of the new line and its two links with the historic line; in addition to the equipment, TELT will prepare the transition from the construction phase to the management phase of the work – for almost a century – through the support of a shadow operator, the service that will accompany TELT on several fronts until the commissioning of the work: organisation and training of the teams, operational management of traffic, safety, assets and their maintenance, definition of the track marketing strategy and management of the two international stations.
